The Ulysses obscenity trial was a 1933 federal case, United States v. One Book Called “Ulysses,” in which Judge John M. Woolsey of the Southern District of New York lifted the U.S. import ban on James Joyce’s novel and rejected the practice of condemning a book based on isolated passages. The Second Circuit affirmed in 1934. Together the two opinions replaced the older English rule with a standard that judged a work as a whole by its effect on an ordinary adult reader, and that reasoning fed directly into the Supreme Court’s modern obscenity doctrine.
Why There Was a Case at All
By the early 1930s, U.S. Customs was routinely seizing copies of Ulysses shipped from Paris, where Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company had published the full novel in 1922. No American publisher would print it. In 1932, Random House publisher Bennett Cerf and attorney Morris Ernst arranged for a copy to be mailed from Paris to New York, expecting it to be intercepted. It was. That gave Ernst the confrontation he wanted: a federal court would now have to rule on whether the book was actually obscene, rather than leaving the question to customs officers.
The seizure power came from Section 305 of the Tariff Act of 1930, codified at 19 U.S.C. § 1305. The statute prohibited importing any “obscene book, pamphlet, paper, writing” from a foreign country, and if a court agreed the material was obscene, it “shall be ordered destroyed and shall be destroyed.”1Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 19 USC 1305 – Immoral Articles; Importation Prohibited The forfeiture action against the seized book — filed against the book itself as the defendant, per the statute — is why the case caption reads the way it does.
The Rule the Case Displaced
Before 1933, American courts judged obscenity by the Hicklin test, taken from the 1868 English case Regina v. Hicklin. Hicklin defined obscenity as material with a “tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.”2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957)
Two features made that test brutal for serious fiction. A court could condemn an entire book on the strength of isolated passages, so a single graphic paragraph could sink hundreds of pages. And the yardstick was the most susceptible reader imaginable, not a typical adult, so a work could be banned because of its potential effect on a child or an easily corrupted person. Literary merit was not a defense. Prosecutors could pull the most provocative lines out of any novel, ignore everything around them, and win. That was the approach the government planned to take against Ulysses.
What Judge Woolsey Held
On December 6, 1933, Woolsey ruled that Ulysses was not obscene and could enter the country. His opinion set out two principles that broke with Hicklin.
Judge the Work as a Whole
Woolsey read the entire novel — twice, he noted — and concluded that Joyce’s purpose was “a sincere and serious attempt to devise a new literary method for the observation and description of mankind.”3Justia Law. United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, 5 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1933) The coarse language served the book’s method of recording how people actually think and speak, rather than existing to arouse the reader. By insisting on the dominant effect of the complete work, Woolsey made it impossible to build an obscenity case out of a handful of vulgar words pulled from context.
Measure the Effect on an Average Adult
Woolsey introduced “l’homme moyen sensuel,” a person of average sexual instincts, as the benchmark for judging a book’s effect. He compared this figure to the reasonable man of tort law and the person “learned in the art” in patent cases: a legal fiction standing in for a normal, balanced adult.3Justia Law. United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, 5 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1933) The question was no longer whether a book might corrupt the most vulnerable reader in society, but how a typical adult would respond.
Applying that standard, Woolsey drew a distinction between the disgusting and the arousing. He wrote that “whilst in many places the effect of ‘Ulysses’ on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.” A book that turns the stomach is not the same as a book that stirs lust, and only the second meets the legal definition of obscenity, which he described as material “tending to stir the sex impulses or to lead to sexually impure and lustful thoughts.”3Justia Law. United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, 5 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1933)
The Second Circuit Affirms — With a Sharp Dissent
The government appealed. In 1934 a Second Circuit panel of Augustus N. Hand, Learned Hand, and Martin T. Manton affirmed by a vote of two to one, with Augustus Hand writing for the majority.
The Majority Standard
Hand sharpened the rule Woolsey had sketched. He wrote that “the question in each case is whether a publication taken as a whole has a libidinous effect,” and that literature deserves the same latitude the law extends to scientific works “where the presentation, when viewed objectively, is sincere, and the erotic matter is not introduced to promote lust and does not furnish the dominant note of the publication.”4Justia Law. United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses, 72 F.2d 705 (2d Cir. 1934) He also treated a book’s standing among qualified critics as “persuasive evidence” of its value, a factor that later became a fixture of obscenity analysis.
The majority did not pretend Ulysses was tame. Hand acknowledged that “the main difference between many standard works and Ulysses is its far more abundant use of coarse and colloquial words and presentation of dirty scenes, rather than in any excess of prurient suggestion.” The book was original, sincere, and did not promote lust, and therefore did not fall within the statute “even though it justly may offend many.”4Justia Law. United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses, 72 F.2d 705 (2d Cir. 1934)
The Manton Dissent
Judge Manton dissented on straight Hicklin grounds. He listed page numbers he considered obscene and called the passages “too indecent to add as a footnote to this opinion.” He rejected the whole-work approach, arguing that individual passages could independently establish obscenity, and dismissed the relevance of Joyce’s artistic intent. His philosophical objection was blunt: “The people do not exist for the sake of literature, to give the author fame, the publisher wealth, and the book a market. On the contrary, literature exists for the sake of the people.” In his view, the law’s job was to protect the most susceptible members of the audience, and literary merit could not override that.
How the Ruling Reshaped American Obscenity Law
The Ulysses decisions never reached the Supreme Court, but their reasoning moved up the system on its own. When the Court took on the definition of obscenity in Roth v. United States in 1957, it adopted the test as “whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest.”5Constitution Annotated. Obscenity The opinion cited Woolsey’s ruling in a footnote as an illustration of the standard.2Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957) Average reader, dominant effect, work as a whole: every piece was there.
The current framework comes from Miller v. California in 1973, which turned Roth into a three-part test. Material is obscene only if all three conditions are met: an average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the work appeals to prurient interest; the work depicts sexual conduct in a patently offensive way under applicable state law; and the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.6Justia U.S. Supreme Court Center. Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) The third prong traces to Augustus Hand’s line that works of art “are not likely to sustain a high position with no better warrant for their existence than their obscene content.”4Justia Law. United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses, 72 F.2d 705 (2d Cir. 1934)
Under that framework a novel like Ulysses would face no serious legal threat today. The Miller test essentially codified what Woolsey did in 1933: judge the whole book, ask how a normal adult would react, and treat literary seriousness as a shield against censorship. A customs dispute over one imported novel became the foundation for the rules that still govern how American law approaches controversial writing, film, and art.